The personal blog of Reyn Bowman, a Durham NC resident, 40-year veteran of community-destination marketing and still an explorer in community sense-of-place. Opinions expressed here are those of the author.

“The difference between Mr. Gates [Bill Gates] and similarly advantaged people is not luck. Mr. Gates went further, taking a confluence of lucky circumstances and creating a huge return on his luck. And this is the important difference.”

Calling it a “Return On Luck” (ROL, the authors make a good point that people like Gates “zoom out to recognize when a luck event has happened and to consider whether they should let it disrupt their plans.” But it isn’t that simple and fortunately Gates is very articulate about the dramatic need to improve education and to reinvigorate upward mobility.

People in their 30s tell me horror stories of friends and older relatives, many even from very conservative, values-based cultures such as Mormonism, who do just what Ryan was describing in that line above from his budge proposal. Some phony business expenses to cheat on taxes, others go on Medicaid while going to college, others milk unemployment benefits until they are dry before looking for work and some cavalierly recommend foreclosure to friends as an easy way to game the system.

Maybe the safety-nets have become too complex and instead of simplifying them to root out fraud, bureaucrats unwittingly add layers of complexity that make them harder to detect. However, starving fraud out of the system through the draconian budget cuts Republicans seek are far more likely to thwart only the innocent, the hard-working, those legitimately pursuing the American dream.

There are just as many stories of people using forms of “corporate welfare” to achieve a phony upward mobility, many documented by Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnson in his book Free Lunch including the insanity around the prescription drug benefit passed during the last Republican-era that was not only un-funded, fueling much the current deficit, but grossly inflated healthcare costs by prohibiting government from seeking bids from companies to provide drugs for the program.

Where in Ryan’s plan is the effort to address that end of the so-called “class-warfare” spectrum?

I’m not sure staying “lost in the 1960s” as many Democrats seem to recommend is the answer. And the chart shown as an image in this blog definitely confirms that retaining the Republican zero-sum policies of the 1980s would be worse.

Occupy Wall Street is more than a talking point and much more than metaphorically using the greed of the financial services industry, unbridled by deregulation. From those I’ve met and talked to, I am convinced that the movement is about the need to dramatically overhaul the tax code and reinvigorate the post-WWII policies which were focused on growing the middle class as well as the cultural values as the heart of the American dream.